These Parasites Are Feeding Off of Capitalism

This is the year of Bernie and Bong. On the surface, that is bad for investors as the widespread intellectual resentment toward capitalism erupts through world culture.

Intellectuals as a class simply cannot bear the distributions of a free market where performance and enterprise trump credentials and degrees.

Bernie Sanders — US socialist and climate crank who never saw a Communist country he didn’t like until China went capitalist — triumphed in the Iowa caucuses.

Bong Joon Ho, the Korean auteur-director whose previous films frothed about climate change and “environmental racism,” broke through at the 92nd annual Academy Awards. His film “Parasite” rode a flood of leftist sentiment in the Academy to win as the first foreign language movie awarded as best feature film.

After winning laurels as best international feature, the film leapt what he called the “one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles.” Bong also garnered laurels for best original screenplay, best director, and best feature film over all — a hat-trick of coveted trophies.

At the same time, it took in a global box office of over $170 million and gained a deal with HBO for a series of sequels.

It previously won the Palm d’Or as best film at Cannes. But Sam Mendes’ World War I saga “1917” won the precursor Golden Globes best picture award — thus rendering the Bong show an underdog for the Oscars. In contrast to “Parasite’s grotesquerie, “1917” is a mostly realistic account of individual human triumph amid the harrowing wastelands of what was history’s stupidest and most counterproductive war.

The Lesson in this Oscar-Winning Film

As Variety’s Jessica King described Bong’s film, it is “a tick fat with the bitter blood of class rage.” It’s about all the grievances of South Koreans after 25 years of capitalist growth from third world poverty to widespread prosperity.

Full of “upstairs-downstairs,” the plot depicts a poor family — the Kim’s — living in a basement apartment in Seoul, who scheme to take over the mansion of the wealthy “Park’s on the hill” by displacing all the household help.

It begins with a fortuitous connection when the Kim’s son becomes an English tutor to the Park’s daughter, despite little sign that he actually knows English. Exploiting “it’s-not-what-you-know-but-who-you-know” cynicism, Bong seems to believe that connections trump ability to perform the work.

The rest of the Kim family infiltrate the household one at a time by discrediting the incumbents and using fraudulent credentials to take over as housekeeper, driver, and art-therapist for the Park’s son.

The themes are couched in allegories — a flood caused by climate change is seen as providing a glamourous view through the Park’s panoramic windows while inundating the basement apartments of the poor.

Down a long flight of stairs is a Stygian underground apartment symbolizing a “hell Joseon” (Korean) of forgotten poor. Here, the Kim’s father will be ultimately incarcerated and the son will hope to liberate him by naively accepting the false capitalist promise that the indigent can become rich through enterprise.

Against all the evidence of Korean society, Bong seems to believe in the leftist myths of capitalism as a static class system controlled by the wealthy and in a capitalism doomed by climate change.

As Bong explains, “both families are parasites.” But in the film the invidious parasites are not the Kim’s but the Park’s, “who are parasites in terms of labor. They cannot even wash dishes or drive themselves, so they leech off a poor family’s labor.”

The film climaxes its allegories with a Park charade as an Indian chief with a tomahawk at a birthday party — the rich aping the “diverse” — followed by an orgy of apparently justifiable revolutionary bloodshed.

Today’s Prophecy

The real lesson of the recent Bong and Bernie shows is that the real gap is not between rich and poor but between academic elite credentials, tenure, capitalist meritocracy, and dynamism. The real gap is between envy and excellence.

The most truly privileged class in America is the professoriate, which holds part time jobs — fully paid — from which they cannot be fired, endowed by capitalist without tenure, who can be “fired” by customers at any time. From their privileged promontory, the credentialed classes currently use claims of inequality and climate doom to discredit their rival elites in business.

Tenured faculty comprise a privileged American aristocracy that resents a capitalist order where performance trumps empty credentialism almost every time. Bong calls the Park’s “leeches,” while showing that Mr. Park — the alleged patriarchal leech-in-chief — works long hours and neglects his family to provide income for the Kim’s.

The real misery and tragedy of the poor is to realize that they have no use to others, no market value to others. This was the true predicament of the Kim’s before they found jobs with the Park’s as a result of capitalist creativity that they do not comprehend.

Bowled over by Bong’s leftist allegories, the film “academy” that awards the Oscars is an extension of the leftist culture of the Universities that has captured the Democratic party for Bernie.

Bernie and Bong are two-of-a-kind, but they ultimately represent an elite of true “parasites” that feed on capitalism while condemning and subverting it.

Such a contradictory cleavage cannot generate a viable political movement.

The true threat to our investments comes not from Bong and Bernie, but from insidious forms of socialism disguised as “trade wars,” green lawyers, and chemophobic lobbyists making gains among conservatives.

Regards,

George Gilder Editor, Gilder’s Daily Prophecy

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